Photo: Li Hao/GT

China witnessed a booming tourism market on Thursday, the first day of the May Day holidays, with surging demand for outbound travel, data from travel platform Fliggy showed on Friday.
 
According to the platform, outbound travel has continued to gain popularity since the Spring Festival and Qingming holidays. On Thursday, the first day of May Day holidays, orders for outbound travel tickets soared by more than 130 percent, with orders of international cruise packages rising 149 percent. China’s Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions (SAR), Japan, Thailand, South Korea become popular outbound travel destinations.
 
Another travel agency Tongcheng said that on the first day of the five-day holidays, flights to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, South Korea from airports in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou experienced peak passenger volumes.
 
Boosted by favorable policies such as transit visa exemptions and tax refund service, China is becoming an increasingly popular destination for foreign visitors. Data from Trip.com showed that inbound travel maintained high growth momentum, with orders up 141 percent year-on-year. Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Shenzhen and Chengdu were among the top 10 popular destinations for inbound travel on the first day of May Day holidays.
 
Tianjin International Cruise Home Port welcomed the simultaneous berthing of three international cruise ships carrying over 2,000 foreign passengers on the first day of the May Day holiday, which was the first time since its resumption of operations. According to statistics, on May 1, the number of inbound and outbound passengers reached nearly 15,000, with over 400 travelers applying for visa-free entry with a period of 240 hours, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
 
In addition, Hengqin Port on the Macao side set new single-day records for both inbound and total cross-border traffic on Thursday, Xinhua reported on Friday. The number of arrivals and departures across the Macao SAR reached approximately 731,000 on Thursday, with nearly 177,000 inbound travelers. The Hengqin Port recorded 56,000 inbound crossings and 104,000 inbound and outbound movements, both figures representing new single-day highs for the port.
 
According to statistics from the Ministry of Transport, cross-regional personnel flow exceeded 332.7 million trips on Thursday, representing a 6.2 percent year-on-year growth. China’s railway network handled a record of nearly 23.12 million passenger trips on Thursday, according to the national railway operator. The figure represents a year-on-year increase of 11.7 percent.
 
Road passenger traffic totaled 305.6 million trips, a year-on-year increase of 4.7 percent. Civil aviation handled 2.336 million passenger trips, up 8.9 percent year-on-year, according to data from the Ministry of Transport released on Friday.
 
Wang Peng, an associate research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Friday that rising orders for both domestic and outbound tours reflect consumers’ enthusiasm and strong demand for travel this year.
 
Wang noted that a booming tourism market will directly drive growth in hotels, restaurants, transportation and other related industries, laying a solid foundation for stable economic growth in the second quarter.